September 30, 2007

I really should pay more attention. I don't have my copy of the Jewish Chronicle now but I think Geoffrey Alderman and Melanie Phillips may actually appear on the same page, I'm not sure. Anyway, for the post before last I borrowed a headline from Melanie Phillips for the headline. She had accused Independent Jewish Voices (I think it was them) of being Jews for genocide as if to say they wanted Jews annihilated, though she disclaimed that interpretation in the article itself. This in turn begs the question, why run the headline? Anyway, I have only just seen that Geoffrey Alderman too thinks that Gazans should be deprived of water. What I noticed about Alderman's article is that he sees fit to liken Qassem rockets, a homemade missile, to the industrially manufactured V1 and V2 bombs pioneered and used by the Germans in World War II. But that isn't the only dubious comparison he invokes. See this:

But just suppose, for a moment, that a radio broadcast from a neutral country had revealed that Nazi-occupied Western Europe was receiving electricity from British power stations. That water from British reservoirs was being transferred to European cities. And that precious fuel, bought from British refineries, was being sold, through third parties, to the Nazi regime. Let us further suppose that, when confronted with these shocking revelations, Churchill’s government had explained that it was permitting the transfer of electricity, water and fuel as “humanitarian gestures”. After all, why should innocent civilians suffer — and be collectively punished — because of the iniquities of Hitler and his allies?

Now I should have thought that if we are going to invoke analogies between the middle east now and World War II then surely Israel is more like nazi Germany. Israel is the aggressor, Israel has the master race belief in itself, Israel is so racist that like Germany before it, it alienates potential friends by assuming that all Arabs are the same. This is what happened last year in Lebanon with many Christian communities, formerly phalangist, turned to Hizbullah for defence or at least moral support.

I think it's always important to study the nazi era, how they got into power, what they did once in power and how they conducted their war effort and how that war effort was informed by its racism. It was its racism that did for it in the end. It's all very well this or that Israeli commander telling his troops to do to a refugee camp (or maybe it was Gaza) what the nazis did to the Warsaw ghetto. But he might want to tell his troops that Germany lost the war and many of its commanders were executed or spent lengthy spells in prison when Germany lost.

But that's not the point I want to make. When people compare Israel to the nazis there are howls of hysterical protest. Some even call it holocaust denial though why liken Israel to the nazis if you are denying the holocaust? I remember Howard Jacobson saying that if you compare Jews to the nazis you are saying that the Jews should be annihilated. I'm not sure of the logic because I've never heard anyone saying that the Germans should be annihilated. Perhaps it was a freudian slip on Jacobson's part. These people that compare the Palestinians to the nazis do seem to want them annihilated. And there are two such possibly on the same page of the main UK Jewish community newspaper.